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Today:
Brace for Foreign-Policy Chaos
NEWS | 17 January 2025
Trump has offered mysterious plans to bring quick ends to the wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East. The president-elect has said there will be “hell to pay in the Middle East” if Hamas hasn’t released the hostages seized on October 7, 2023, by the time he is inaugurated. The secretary-of-state nominee, Marco Rubio, has been a NATO defender, and Mike Waltz, Trump’s incoming national security adviser, has argued forcefully in favor of tougher sanctions on Moscow’s energy sector to strangle Putin’s government economically. He authorized the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the general who directed Iran’s militias and proxy forces around the Middle East. And the president-elect was quick to embrace the chaos when asked by a reporter at a news conference last month about his plans for Iran.

Top Stories:
The Place Where I Grew Up Is Gone
NEWS | 17 January 2025
Jill thought he was out of town, at a hot spring. She asked if my father and I could head out from our place nearby to look for him. The author and her father driving through the canyons to their old house. We were both hoping this 25-year-old piece of nylon could get us through closed roads and into our old neighborhood. A football field away, across a small canyon, Dad and a construction crew built what he’d thought would be his bachelor pad.

World:
Elon Musk Imagined a Cover-Up
NEWS | 17 January 2025
“You don’t hate the legacy media enough,” Musk insisted at one point during his multiday spree of posts on X, his social-media platform. Like school shootings in the United States, grooming gangs are a particular type of crime that emerged from the laws and social conditions of a specific time and place. In the 2000s and early 2010s, the racial dynamics of the grooming gangs made English towns extremely reluctant to face what was happening. Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak created a “grooming gangs task force” that has helped police make more than 550 arrests. But he has refused to fulfill a peculiar demand from Musk: to normalize the pseudonymous agitator Tommy Robinson, whom the far right credits for making the grooming scandal public.

Current Events:
The Right Way to Look for a New Job
NEWS | 17 January 2025
Either way, you are not alone: At any given time, a substantial proportion of American workers are looking for a better job. Although you can probably count on not turning into a cockroach, chronically low job satisfaction has been shown in research to provoke mental-health problems. They found that job dissatisfaction was significantly related to depression at the one-year follow-up. In this case, your job dissatisfaction is not your employer’s fault; you have simply outgrown your old job or career path. And you should probably expect to find some things you like less in a new position—a better job can be a more demanding one, for instance.

News Flash:
Milk Has Divided Americans for More Than 150 Years
NEWS | 17 January 2025
To Americans, milk has always been much more than a drink. Newer conveniences such as canned condensed milk and milk delivery could save time and money, he acknowledged, but at a spiritual cost. Milk has come a long way from the family farm; it is now mainly the purview of science and policy. Much of the pushback against innovation in milk today is not just about the milk itself but also about government overreach (indeed, milk-drinking is at its lowest point since the 1970s, but consumption of raw milk has spiked in the past year). Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the most visible raw-milk enthusiast, has vowed to end the FDA’s “aggressive suppression” of products including raw milk if he leads the Department of Health and Human Services.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 17 January 2025
SmartSync is a mobile application, compatible with any Android smartphone, that syncs your important data to your email. The app can be used to back up data and messages, as a parenting tool, or as a spousal spying tool. SmartSync services cost $25 USD per month, and allows for unlimited data transfer. The app can be found Here

Latest:
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
NEWS | 17 January 2025
So historically speaking, we see that there were either acts of oblivion, laws of oblivion, or articles of oblivion that appeared in peace treaties or as legislative measures or as kind of kingly edicts that were issued in the aftermath of revolutions, wars, and uprisings. But there’s also, in other languages: in Russian it’s вечное забвение, “eternal oblivion,” right? Kinstler: Yeah, I mean, like, you’re always rescuing things from oblivion or losing things to oblivion. So you’re not going all the way to saying, you know, an act of oblivion. But if he had pardoned some of the low-level offenders, would that have been in the spirit of oblivion?

Breaking:
Israel Never Defined Its Goals
NEWS | 17 January 2025
There will be scenes of jubilation and triumph from Gazans and Israelis, and efforts by both sides’ leadership to spin the Gaza war as a victory. But Hamas is still the only armed force likely to rule Gaza when Israel withdraws. If the intention is to end the war, then the war will end with Hamas bloodied but unbowed. A cease-fire in Gaza, as of right now, will leave Hamas in power at a level well beyond manageable for Israel. Yair Rosenberg: Trump made the Gaza cease-fire happenTempering this enthusiasm is a downward trend in its allies’ fortunes.

Trending:
The Forgotten Woman Who Transformed Forensics
NEWS | 17 January 2025
The kit, conceived within the Chicago Police Department in the mid-1970s, was trademarked under the name “Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit,” after Sergeant Louis Vitullo. As one of Goddard’s colleagues told Kennedy, Vitullo “screamed at her” and told her to leave his office. In Kennedy’s telling, Goddard’s obscurity stems from the sacrifices she made for the rape kit to exist. In 1982, New York City adopted the Vitullo kit, and Goddard commuted to the East Coast to train doctors, nurses, and cops. Some of these limitations can be traced to a lack of effective innovation in the 50 years since the Vitullo kit was developed.

This Just In:
A Sweeping January 6 Pardon Is an Attack on the Judiciary
NEWS | 17 January 2025
More than 800 have received sentences of incarceration, including some who were permitted to serve their sentences in home detention. Paul Rosenzweig: Pardon Trump’s critics nowThe judicial branch is an integral part of our country’s criminal legal system. Federal judges in the nation’s district courts must ensure that every defendant before them is treated fairly and afforded the same constitutional rights. Some defendants who have been sentenced by a federal judge later receive clemency—either a pardon or commutation of sentence—from the president. These federal judges deserve more respect than that.

Today:
Beyond Doomscrolling
NEWS | 17 January 2025
I scroll again: “Celebrities Reveal How They REALLY Feel About Kelly Clarkson,” another post teases. This is followed by a post about a new red-flag warning in L.A.: The fire is not relenting. Read: The unfightable fireTo watch the destruction in Los Angeles through the prism of our fractured social-media ecosystem is to feel acutely disoriented. Call it doomscrolling, gawking, bearing witness, or whatever you want, but there is an irresistible pull in moments of disaster to consume information. As I read these dispatches and watch helplessly from afar, the phrase time on site bangs around in my head.

Top Stories:
Is Moderate Drinking Okay?
NEWS | 17 January 2025
Here’s a simple question: Is moderate drinking okay? Around the same time, a meta-analysis published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded that moderate alcohol drinking is associated with a longer life. First, my seemingly simple question about moderate drinking may not have a simple answer. And now he’s convinced, as many other scientists are, that the supposed health benefits of moderate drinking were based on bad research and confounded variables. For example, a study can find a relationship between moderate alcohol consumption and breast-cancer detection, but moderate consumption is correlated with income, as is access to mammograms.

World:
America Just Kinda, Sorta Banned Cigarettes
NEWS | 17 January 2025
If enacted—still a big if—it would decimate the demand for cigarettes more effectively than any public-service announcement ever could. By the end of the century, the FDA predicts, 4.3 million fewer people would die because of cigarettes. In 2017, his FDA commissioner put the idea of cutting the nicotine in cigarettes to nonaddictive levels on the agency’s agenda. But although cigarettes might be inseparable from nicotine, nicotine is not inseparable from cigarettes. These products are generally safer than cigarettes because they do not burn tobacco, and it is tobacco smoke, not nicotine, that causes most of the harmful effects of cigarettes.

Current Events:
How Netanyahu Misread His Relationship With Trump
NEWS | 17 January 2025
Although honesty requires crediting Trump, his success was not the product of magical powers or an indictment of Biden-administration diplomacy. As the Gaza war began to meander—and as it became clear that Israel would never achieve the “total victory” that he promised—Netanyahu dipped into this old playbook. Once Trump emphatically expressed his desire to end the war, Netanyahu was stuck. Over the past four years, Netanyahu clearly has had reason to feel insecure about his relationship with Trump. Trump reportedly abhorred the fact that Netanyahu called Joe Biden to congratulate him on winning the 2020 presidential election.

News Flash:
How Worried to Be About Bird Flu
NEWS | 17 January 2025
Lora Kelley: We last spoke in April, after a dairy worker became infected with bird flu. At the time, you described your level of concern about bird flu as “medium.” How would you describe your level of worry now? Lora: How has the government’s response to bird flu compared with its response to COVID? Katherine: There’s no doubt that having COVID in the rearview affected the government’s response. Lora: Have we missed the opportunity to mitigate the spread of bird flu?